17 useful online tools for self-employed professionals

By Rosie Beasley

The internet has had an important impact on the way that small
businesses operate. Tools that are available for free or at rock-bottom
prices are helping to make self-employed professionals and entrepreneurs
more efficient and effective in business.

Here are 17 of my favourites:

6 online tools to help you promote your services

www.Slideshare.com
This is a social sharing site where you can create an account and
upload presentations. You can also create webinars by using voice-over
on your presentations. The platform allows you to promote and track user
statistics of your content within the Slideshare site or where it is
embedded on your own site.

www.wufoo.com
Wufoo is a great form builder which also collects responses and allows
you to create reports from them. It can be used for a multitude of
things, from surveys to CRM to callback requests.

Js-kit.com
This company offers free UGC tools that you can add-on to your website
such as commenting software, star ratings and content aggregators.

www.addthis.com
Share your content with all the major social networks using an add-this
button.

Google Analytics
Probably the best free web analytics software at the moment, use this
to track and analyse the behaviour of your site users.

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www.relenta.com
This is a useful tool that you can use to manage your business
contacts. Manage your email, CRM, documents, calendar and tasks on the
same software. It costs $25 a month but may be worthwhile if you have to
juggle a lot of sales contacts.

crm.zoho.com
If you only want CRM and you want it free, then Zoho offers a good
version which you can integrate with your Adwords and other paid search
ads.

www.mint.com
This site can help you manage your finances. Particularly helpful for
freelancers or self-employed who have less rigid book-keeping than a
small business. It’s a US site but is widely recognised so won’t be
long before there a UK version pops up.

www.efax.com
While for many smaller businesses faxing has become a thing of the
past, many companies still use it to communicate. If you don’t want to
invest in a fax machine but are required to send and receive faxes
regularly, then this site might be up your street.

Stock.xchng
This site has a lot of free stock images which you can use for your
website or promotional materials

www.yousendit.com
If you send files with customer data or large images to clients, it can
help to use an online file sending service. This is more secure and
large files won’t be a problem like they can be with email software.

www.centraldesktop.com
If you are a freelancer or work in a remote team, this online service
can be useful for sharing documents between colleagues and collaborating
on projects.

www.gotomeeting.com
Useful for setting up online meetings, it is better than a conference
call in some respects and you can also show presentations/demonstrations at the same time.

www.slimtimer.com
This site helps you track the time you spend working on tasks for your
clients. It also creates reports that you can send to clients to support
your fees when invoicing them.

www.Skype.com
Using Skype you can make free calls over the internet to other users
and save money on calls to landlines and mobiles. They are even real
skype phones available so you don’t need to speak into a headset. Using
the web camera function makes this either much better or more calamitous
depending on whether you work in your pyjamas or not.